A Look at FreeNAS Server

NewsForge (Also owned by VA) has a quick look at FreeNAS, an open source network attached storage server that can be deployed on pretty much any old PC you have sitting around the house. From the article: "The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media."

Comments

NAS

[certel]

Would a NAS device not require some pretty good processing power under a bit of a load? I know of course it would be scalable based on the usage, but still, the notion that it runs on 'any old system' wouldn't be entirely true.

Re:NAS

[nharmon]

Normally, no. The article mentioned setting up a software RAID 5 array. This still probably wouldn't overwhelm a half-decent processor (400mhz+), unless one of the drives had to be replaced. Then the processor will be swamped while it recovers.

Re:NAS

[Orange Crush]

Why? All it's doing is serving up files via Samba shares. I have 20 clients connected to a Debian/Samba box with a 1 ghz P3, 1 gig Ram, and a couple 80 gig IDE drives (no RAID or anythign) . . . not under much strain at all, actually. I know intensive IDE transactions need a lot of CPU, but we're talking about shared office docs. I can't imagine drive operations getting all that intensive when the major bottleneck in this case is going to be to 100mbit ethernet card.

Re:NAS

[questionlp]

I think the bottleneck will first be with your network connection (primarily if it's 100Mbps). With Gigabit Ethernet, your hard drives or drive array would be the next bottleneck (mostly if your network and storage controller are on the same PCI bus).

A lot of the SOHO NAS boxes run off of ARM processors, which are both power efficient but also able to handle the basic I/O needs of a NAS box. Granted, SOHO NAS boxes aren't meant for large companies or large workgroups, but would fit in as a departmental file server for testing or near-distance storage.

Higher end NAS boxes due use more powerful servers to handle 1+ Gigabit Ethernet connections, iSCSI or Fibre Channel, multiple PCI-X busses or multiple 4-8x PCI Express drops, and large amounts of RAM for caching and such. For instance, the latest corporate NAS boxes fron Snap/Adaptec use Opteron processors.

I've ran a small workgroup file server off of a Pentium Pro 200/256K with 256MB of RAM and several 9GB SCSI drives in RAID-5 and the bottleneck was definitely the two 100Mbps Ethernet connections. Of course, YMMV.

Re:NAS

[harrkev]

I am certainly not an expert on NAS...

Gigabit ethernet is pretty rare on the type of old hardware that typically gets pressed into NAS usage. It would not take too much processing horsepower to saturate a 100 Mb/s link. If, on the other hand, you system has gigabit built-in, I suspect that it has a processor attached that can handle it.

But, if you are the type of guy to attach a PCI gigabit ethernet port to an old P-3, then the processor might not be able to keep up.

And now for something completely different...

There are distos like FreeNAS that do one thing well. There are other distros that can also do broadband router functions. Does anybody know of anything that does both? I will spare you the details, but I would like one box that can do NAS duty (NFS and Samba), and act as a router. The computer will have three ethernet ports -- one for cable modem, one for the switch to the wired LAN, and one for the wireless AP. I know that I could roll-my-own by using (insert favorite distro here), but that would take me longer to learn how to set up than I have right now, especially with my wife's business (see signature below). Something with a point-n-drool interface that is web-administered would be perfect. Bonus points for print server. Any suggestions?

Re:NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to rebuild my array on my file server, which is 700 gigabytes. It has 4 250 gig drives

That sure is a lot of p0rn. You might want to get some help.

Re:NAS

[0racle]

Everyone always assumes a huge datastore at home is for porn. It's just as likely that its for illegal downloads. Those movies and series take up a hell of a lot of space.

Re:NAS

[drsmithy]

How big of an array though. I have 4 250 gig drives in a RAID 5 config. It seriously took 36+ hours to rebuild on a Pentium 4 2.4 gigahertz with 1 gig of ram.

Firstly, make sure your rebuild isn't being throttled. cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max will print out the maximum speed (in kb/sec) the array will rebuild at. Use something like echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max to set it suitably high so that the throttling won't occur.

Secondly, the limiting factor in your rebuild speed will be (in decreasing order of likelihood) bus bandwith, individual disk performance, disk controller or driver bugs/quirks/limitations, CPU speed. Although if you have PCIe or PCI-X disk controllers (unlikely) you may hit limits in individual disk performance before you run out of bus bandwidth. With a 2.4Ghz P4 I can pretty confidently say your bottleneck will never be the CPU.

In your case, your machine almost certainly has all the drives hanging off a single 33Mhz, 32 bit PCI bus. So the absolute upper limit on your array's performance is going to be around 120M/s, and that's assuming the machine isn't doing anything else except rebuilding the array. You're only ever likely to see this sort of performance off the array from long, sequential reads, however (dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null type of thing).

(This is a rough overview). With 4 drives, you have roughly 30M/s per drive maximum, so your best-case RAID rebuild speed will be about 30M/s - this is assuming your drives can sustain 30M/s for both reads and writes across their entire surface. Rebuilding a RAID5 array involves reading data and parity from N-1 drives and writing it to the Nth drive - in other words you have to completely reconstruct a single disk. At 30M/s, it should take about 250000/30/60 ~= 138 minutes to copy the 250G necessary to reconstruct that disk.

(Tech-savvy readers should realise at this point why hardware RAID is theoretically faster than software RAID - particularly for average PCs and/or large numbers of drives - and why it has nothing to do with the "overhead" of calculating RAID5/6 parity.)

Note that 138 minutes is a best case scenario, so it taking 36 hours could be explained by you using the system at the same time, automated system maintenance occurring, less-than-stellar drivers, etc, etc. With such a massive difference between "should be" and "was", however, I'd be examining the individual components pretty closely to see where the bottleneck is. What's the maximum performance you can get from each individual drive (use hdparm and dd). How about from the entire array ?

Ooh

[MaestroSartori]

I've been looking for something like this for a while now. I was contemplating one of those pre-built consumer level NAS (like the Terastation), but a nice tailored setup like this could tempt me to build my own. I need storage space for samples, I make lots of music with them :)

I know it costs money....

[j2crux]

But I fell in love with something called a Kuro-box. Here's a link, http://kurobox.com/revolution/what.html From the site: The KuroBox is a small-footprint Linux-based embedded platform for a personal server. The current incarnation of the KuroBox, the KuroBox/HG, sports a 266Mhz PowerPC processor, 128MB of RAM, 2 USB 2.0 Ports, and a 10/100/1000Mbit network interface. I got mine off ebay (with a 250 hdd) for ~$200, and I couldnt be happier!

Re:I know it costs money....

[sholden]

There are a bunch of consumer level devices designed to have a USB hard drive plugged into them and export SMB shares from it. They are all around $80 or so. I have this one: http://www1.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid= 640 but there are a bunch of ones by other companies.

It runs linux out of the box, but I've flashed mine to run a full debian system, only 32MB of RAM is the main draw back. But its attached to 3 USB drives in a software RAID, and a CD storage device, and a thumb drive (for the main system - so the disks don't get hit by every cron job). Plus plugging my digital camera into it downloads all the photos into dated directories on the 'photos' share. It also serves some web pages, mainly a cgi interface to eject disks from the CD storage device.

Works well for me, and it's a reasonably cheap and pysically small (and very underpowered CPU/memory wise) linux machine with 2 USB ports and a network port.

Dedicated solutions are often better.

[Anonymous Coward]

What most people forget about these kinds of systems is that they have fairly hefty power consumption. Until the past year or so, desktop manufacturers placed very little emphasis on truly minimizing power consumption. They do manage to hold it within reason, but often that's no enough.

Dedicated storage systems are often designed in such a way so as to minimize the amount of power they consume. Some use several ARM or MIPS CPUs, which can offer suitable processing capabilities without the immense energy consumption of even a single x86 chip. The dedicated hardware itself is designed so as to eliminate unnecessary circuitry.

When it comes to users who have hundreds of these machines, the energy savings of a dedicated system often far outweigh the initial savings of going with a PC/FreeNAS-style combination. Even smaller-scale users, who may only have a single machine, will notice the savings if they choose to use their system for several years.

Re:Dedicated solutions are often better.

[EllynGeek]

Can you give some examples? I don't see where you're going to minimize power consumption no matter what you use, because your drive array is going to require a good-quality power supply that can handle multiple 12v lines. You can run it headless, but hard drives are power-hungry no matter what.

Re:Dedicated solutions are often better.

[harrkev]

It is called "underclocking"...

If you have a "overclocking" mobo, you can probably quite easily underclock it as well. If, on the other hand, your mobo says "Dell" on it, then you probably don't have access to the BIOS screens necessary to do that. You can find Windows software that might be able to do the job (depending upon chipset), but who runs Windows for a NAS server?
But, with that being said, modern hardware is better. Taking an Athlon 64 and cranking the clock speed down by a factor of 10 and dropping the core voltage is likely to be a lot more efficient than taking an old 400MHz P-2 and reducing the clock speed by 1/2. So, you throw more expensive hardware at the problem in order to consume less power.

This is just and educated guess, though. I am not an expert.

Re:Dedicated solutions are often better.

[drinkypoo]

What most people forget about these kinds of systems is that they have fairly hefty power consumption. Until the past year or so, desktop manufacturers placed very little emphasis on truly minimizing power consumption. They do manage to hold it within reason, but often that's no enough.

Dedicated storage systems are often designed in such a way so as to minimize the amount of power they consume.

Who told you that? Maybe for the little tiny junior-grade ones that you can buy from linksys and whatnot... but if you have more than a couple of hard drives, odds are that the product you're dealing with is made up of a bunch of commodity PC components in a custom rackmount case. This is no less true if it's a 1U box than 4U.

For instance I've got a 1U Maxtor server that came with maybe a terabyte (it's got four drive bays) and it's a 1U Socket 370 Celeron system.

Nothing except the cutesy little baby NAS devices is designed to be especially low power - and if you're using software RAID, you really want a grip of CPU power, especially if you're doing RAID5.

User Security Gives MS A Run For Its Money

[doctorcisco]

There is virtually no user security. Any authenticated user has full rights to all data on the system. Fine for home, but until they get user security figured out, not ready for anything more than that. And given that it wants to play nice with Windoze, *Nix, and Apple, the security is gonna be the hard part. *NIX without maddeningly granular security ... who'da thunk? doc

OpenFiler?

[Gothmolly]

How is this any different than the OpenFiler Project?

Re:OpenFiler?

[un1xl0ser]

OpenFiler is based on CentOS 3. It does NOT fit in a small footprint. The point of FreeNAS wasn't to have a different installer and a web interface to polish it up, it was for a small footprint.

How a real network file system?

[GlobalEcho]

I can set up Samba, etc. on just about any box. What defies me is setting up OpenAFS. How about a server that supports OpenAFS or Coda?

Great, but typically UNIX

[Graboid]

As others have said, been there done that with Linux/BSD. Nice to have a dedicated package, but it's definitely not for the casual user and requires dedicated drives/machines (as one would expect for RAID).

I was amused that he could screw up the installation so easily by just creating a local user and it lacked auto-configuration. Imagine that in a review of a commercial product. "Easy to use and install, but it locked me out of my system and required a re-install and it couldn't find my network card".

Fact is, folks just expect open source to be a pain in the ass to work with and require tweaking or extreme attention to detail. It's almost a right of passage. And users accept and embrace it on a scale they would NEVER accept from a commercial product - particularly 'evil' Microsoft.

Anyway, nice open source addition, but it definitely belongs in the open source group (as in not-ready-for-normal-people group).

Re:Neat but..

[WindBourne]

And yet, small appliances like this will probably win the day. In the end, they will run on top of xen in their own environment and be easily upgradable.

IOW, this is a good time for Linux to create small appliances like this targeting a xen base.

Humm...

[wolenczak]

What's new about this? Been doing that for years!, Where's the difference between this box and a linuxbox with samba/nfs/fstab properly configured?

I would think that a home NAS is a case where I can toss in any spare harddrive i find, plug it to the network and that's it. Not a whooooole PC.

Cheap hardware anyone?

[sbrown123]

I want a network attached storage device for home but prices vary from $500 to $2000+. I also want to run my own apps like Subversion. But I can't find any cheap, compact, and power efficient hardware for doing this. Any ideas?

OK, a serious question

[caudron]

Tell me why we don't see cheap network appliances at Walmart and Bestbuy that accept USB drives and printers all in one convenient box.

I see the "cheap" drive sharing boxes and the "cheap" printer sharing boxes but, given how easy it is to set up SAMBA on a VERY low end device, why don't we see any that do both?

And while I'm on the subject, why don't we see cheap server appliances for other services? Is it lack of market demand that keeps me from being about the buy a low power, cheap apache server in a box the size of a cable modem? Same for proftpd and squirrelmail/postfix/mailman? Seriously, I know the market is limited, but it's hardly non-existent! Especially if they made it easy to set up and use, then ANYONE could be an end point. That is the real promise fo the Internet to me.

And before I get those "just do it yourself on old hardware" replies, I have already done so and posted the how-to's for others. What I'm asking for is not an easy way to set up apache. Apache is pretty easy out of the box. I'm asking for an easy, low-power apache appliance that EVEN a relatively non-technical person can set up and use. Seems cool to me. Especially coupled with a cheap DNS appliance box.

These services beg for hardware modularization.

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/

Re:OK, a serious question

[Penguin Programmer]

Tell me why we don't see cheap network appliances at Walmart and Bestbuy that accept USB drives and printers all in one convenient box.

I see the "cheap" drive sharing boxes and the "cheap" printer sharing boxes but, given how easy it is to set up SAMBA on a VERY low end device, why don't we see any that do both?

Because if they put them in one box, you'd only have to buy one box. And then you'd only have to upgrade one box in a few years. The way it works right now, they can sell you two boxen (and if you're an average consumer, you'll be more than happy to buy two boxen) and then in a few years when the latest and greatest printer connector/wireless protocol/ethernet standard/etc hits, they can sell you two new boxen to work with your new network/printer/computer/etc.

Before asking such questions as "why don't they put both things in one box," keep in mind that the entire computer industry is a huge scam and that most consumers are so stupid about computers that they don't even care.

Re:OK, a serious question

[Jim Buzbee]

Plenty of places do sell them. I don't know about Wallmart, but they are available. See:
This one for an example. I should know, I've written reviews for a dozen or so of these things...

Re:OK, a serious question

[MightyYar]

"And while I'm on the subject, why don't we see cheap server appliances for other services? Is it lack of market demand that keeps me from being about the buy a low power, cheap apache server in a box the size of a cable modem? Same for proftpd and squirrelmail/postfix/mailman? Seriously, I know the market is limited, but it's hardly non-existent! Especially if they made it easy to set up and use, then ANYONE could be an end point. That is the real promise fo the Internet to me."

I don't think that there is a market for the types of devices you are listing. Who would use the apache box? Bloggers? People sharing family photos? There are already better solutions for these people in the form of myspace, blogger, flickr, etc. People more technically savvy than these folks can set up one of the more general-use network appliances out there. A pre-configured, out of the box ftp server is even more niche, and I don't even want to try to find a non-tech-whiz that even has an interest in running a mail server in these days of free gig accounts at Google and among the mountains of spam.

Frankly the only reason I think that network hard drives are so popular is that people are terrified of cracking open their PCs to install a hard drive, and they don't really understand the difference between the various external types. Slightly more savvy users get sold on the ability to share music between multiple computers, or backing up from multiple computers to one drive without swapping wires, and all that jazz.

Re:OK, a serious question

[Technician]

Frankly the only reason I think that network hard drives are so popular is that people are terrified of cracking open their PCs to install a hard drive, and they don't really understand the difference between the various external types.

You missed that one. I have a foster home. I load the MP3's, drivers, and photos on a NAS instead of on some local drive. I also put the My Documents on the NAS. The shares are password protected and I can use any machine handy to access it. Sometimes I use a laptop. Sometimes I use a desktop with a CD burner for a change of tunes for the car. All the special drivers for the various machines are on the NAS. It helps in a rebuild as I don't have to find all the driver disks for everything. Sometimes I'm out in the garage and want some tunes other than what the local DJ wants to dribble all over. A laptop with wireless brings the tunes out. A NAS makes a lot of sence if you are not a bachlor with a single PC. It is a whole lot cheaper than buying a bunch of 160 Gig drives for all the PC's. I can keep the machines running on the 15-60 Gig drives they already have.

My NAS draws 15 watts and the hard drive powers down after 20 minutes of inactivity. It has no fan. Why would I want to leave a PC on 24X7 to share a few files. The NAS is also encrypted. If it is stolen, the removal of power unmounts the encrypted partition. It can only be remounted by providing the encryption key through a password protected web interface. It is much safer than data on a local drive. The NAS box is blocked from the WEB by my NAT router. It can't be directly attacked from the WEB. An attacker would have to compromise one of the other machines first. It adds a layer of security to the data.

Not necessarily....

[PainBreak]

I can't comment on FreeNAS, because I have never used it, but Quantum Snap NAS devices (which were later rebranded as Dell PowerVault NAS devices) handle decent loads (100+ users at a time), and utilize a proprietary *nix OS with 32MB onboard ram and a MASSIVE Pentium 233 MMX. It's also doing software RAID. I'd say "Any Old Box" is probably a good fit.

Arrrg! Samba is not acceptable for macs!

[SuperBanana]

The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs

Look. Just because MacOS X supports SMB, does not mean that SMB is an acceptable solution for file-serving to MacOS X clients.

• SMB is absolutely glacial at file metadata/folder retrieval compared to Appleshare. Do the following test: back up a large volume via SMB using Retrospect or a similar tool on the Mac. Then repeat using Appleshare. Using SMB, the file/folder scan will progressively slow down and take hours to finish.
• SMB does not support the character set or file-name lengths Macs REQUIRE. Yes, I said, REQUIRE. You'll discover this when you go to make an emergency backup of a mac to a SMB share and get errors about filenames that are too long, or have characters that aren't valid. A lot of applications contain files in their internal structure that violate SMB naming restrictions.
• When Samba runs across a file that it can't display the name for...IT IGNORES IT!
• Samba requires a lot of tweaking to get it to perform decently, and despite the usual recommended config changes, I've never been able to get Samba to perform as well as a "stock" Appleshare client.

Netatalk has some of its own crankyness (and if you run Debian/Ubuntu, you need to rebuild the debian package with SSL support or passwords are transmitted in the clear, thanks to the OpenSSL/GNU idiocy), but it doesn't have nearly the basic functionality problems Samba does for Macs.

Sidenote: looks like they "borrowed" the complete user interface from m0n0wall...and it looks like they MIGHT use netatalk...googling turned up some hints that netatalk might be built-in.

Re:Neat but..

[Daniel_Staal]

It could just as easily be said that you could do that with a bare computer and an assembler. Sure you could, but do you want to? Starting with a basic Linux/BSD distro is easier. This is easier yet.

This is just a specifically-configured FreeBSD-based distrobution. It makes one moderately complicated setup easy enough for a causal computer dabbler. (Not quite a novice, but not an expert either.) It's useful if it can do a good job, because it makes it easier for people to set this up, with less time, effort, and knowledge on their part.

Which means they can focus their time, effort, and knowledge on something else.

Hardware for 8-10 drives?

[freelunch]

I always thought the OS and software were the easy part. What do folks like for hardware platforms? I don't care about 2 or 4 drive solutions - those are trivial. I'm talking 8-10 drives in the 320-500 gb range. Most turn-key solutions are Far too expensive when compared to the 'build a box' DIY alternative.

I've been building linux boxes for this and have used Antec cases in the past with 120mm fans. Proper drive cooling and monitoring are very important. Anything beyond 5 or 6 drives means using the 5 1/4 drive bays and that gets old fast.

What controllers? Cheap SATA controllers are a must. I couldn't care less about the $200-$400 controllers. Some controllers don't do dma correctly when you have more than one in a machine. I have played with the Syba SD-SATA-4p under Linux and it works okay (though it does not work with one amd64 machine that has a Promise ATA controller).. Price is right at about $15-$25 for four ports ($4-8/port!). I haven't tried two or more in the same machine. There does not seem to be any SMART support in the current linux driver.

10 320 gb drives = $1150 = 36 cents/GB.
$500 machine + $1150 = 51.5 cents/GB.

Re:Hardware for 8-10 drives?

[tweek]

My setup is as follows:

Dual-P3 1Ghz
1GB of RAM
4x250GB SATA - Linux Software RAID5 - New array
2x160 SATA - Linux Software RAID1 - Old Array

The neat part is the external SATA. I planned this for about a year and waited till all the parts came to the right price point:

The 4-250GB drives are in one of these:
http://www.cooldrives.com/icqudrmusaen.html

Connected to my 4-port SATA adapter using one of these:

http://www.cooldrives.com/seatamcasaii1.html
and one of these
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-multilane-pci-adapt er-bracket.html

The raid card is a cheap rocketraid 1640. I'm not a fan of the halfass raid that is thrown on the low-end SATA cards but I needed the ports.

My next step is to add another configuration similar to this one in the same server.

naslite

[coconutstudio]

Naslite (free version) worked great on my salvaged P-100 32MB system running quiety and headless with nothing but a floppy drive and a 300GB HD. Luckily, it recognized the large HD (since Linux/etc bypasses bios) and I didn't need an IDE card. Performance was acceptable (good but not great) for small base of users but I wouldn't want to stick a RAID in it or have more than 5 nodes. The total system consumed total of 25-30watts (a little high compared to NSLU). Freenas looked good except for higher amount of ram(96m which I didn't have.

Use a spareimage

[bill_mcgonigle]

If you need to do this, setup a sparse disk image on the SMB share and mount it. Copy files to the disk image. Slow but flawless.

I'm also working on some docs on how to do this with rsync, which actually works much faster if you don't need to use it interactively (big if).

SMB,NFS,AFP-Mmmmm

[theolein]

I have setup a Linux server to server to both Mac and PC clients on the same volumes/shares using AFP with the Netatalk package, and SMB with Samba. Netatalk, in its new incarnations is by far the best non-apple AFP server available. It works seamlessly with modern OSX clients (10.3 and 10.4), supporting precomposed UTF-8 charactersets, long file names (most commercial NAS devices still only support the ancient appletalk implementation with 32 MacRoman charactersets and glacial unreliable performance) and even Bonjour/Zeroconf support.

Netatalk works surprisingly well with modern Samba versions (post 3.0) that support UTF-8 (and now even includes a netatalk module to ease compatibility), and both samba and netatalk hide one another's specific data from the other so that resource forks are kept and if the mswindows option is enabled in netatalk, the worst character problems (?\ etc in filenames) are safe.

What I would really love to see is a system that reliably combines these, PLUS NFS for Linux shares. The FreeNAS looks good, but seesm to be a bit on the young side without decent Mac support, and god knows there are enough Mac using companies that don't want to have to fork over money for XServes.

Recovery

[babanada]

I threw a FreeNAS server up on my home network one day. The next day I decided to back up an XP box that had never been backed up before using the included backup program over the net. The following week I mistakenly deleted files in cygwin (watch out for the /cygdrive/driveletter, it is hidden from / and doesn't follow normal rules... that's my story anyway) and had to restore the XP box. I was able to restore the system over the network from the FreeNAS box. It was a *very* quick restore. Anyway, I like FreeNAS as a quick and easy way to do network backups/restores. The install is very quick and painless, and the BSD it runs on is stable and fast. Agreed about the security issues for corporate use, unless it is just a cheap way to make a drive and an old box into a complete recovery device... just turn it off when you aren't recovering.

Re:samba doesn't do +2GB

[pehowell]

It's actually the Samba client that limits you to 2GB or less. Use CIFS to mount the Samba volume, if you have files over 2GB in size.

Re:Neat but..

[Illbay]

I'm likely in the minority on a site where "nerd is king," but I *REALLY* like this trend toward making the difficult simpler for us casual administrators.

Several years ago I tried to set up my Linux box as an internet router/gateway, using IPTABLES and what-not. I failed just through sheer lack of time to commit to learning all the stuff I'd need to know to do it properly. About that time, the first "Cable/DSL routers" came on the market, and made moot my need.

Now, however, it is very easy to configure the various widgets that you'd need for this task because tools exist on (e.g.) Fedora to make it so.

For myself, I'm glad I can put the effort into learning more in-depth some of the things I can do with Linux, and yet those things I find tedious, or don't have the time to do, have "easy-to-use" tools handy.

Google is your friend

[twitter]

I can set up Samba, etc. on just about any box. What defies me is setting up OpenAFS.

Knoppix and OpenAFS.

Tell me how well it works.

Re:Or the much better NASLite

[lostatredrock]

Unless you ever want to use more than 4 drives in which case naslite can't help you at all. I have used NasLite OpenFiler, FreeNAS, as well as a full blown Fedora install at various times for file sharing. For me in the end FreeNAS was the way too go. NasLite was nice, but I had more than 4 drives I wanted to put in so thaty one was a no go as it does not support PCI controller cards. OpenFiler was designed to be a much more robust and wide ranging installation than what I needed. It is based on a full distro and it shows in the number of features, but also in the complexity. The real killing point for me there was the lack of any built in usser support. Any authentication had to go through an authentication server, since it was a full distro I could have set this up on the same box...but I am running this on an internal network and security was not a big thing. FreeNAS on the other hand gave me everything I needed: suport for as many drives as I wanted, basic authentication, and a web interface that does literaly anything I want it to. Since install it has been up without incident with the exception of power outages (UPS a friend of mine got me at discount should help with this) and upgrades.

Network card troubles

[daybot]

One thing to watch while doing the initial configuration is that the FreeNAS server doesn't do any auto assignment of the network card. I assumed that since I only had one network card, it would automatically be assigned as the network card for the system. I was wrong. I only realised the problem after an hour of checking connections and cables. You must assign the network card as laid out in the "LAN interface and IP configuration" section of the user guide.

heh, RTFM!

Re:::shakes head::

[drsmithy]

[Software RAID is documented. If it fails, you can plug the drives into another system that understands the RAID format and get at the data.]

I haven't dealt with software RAID enough to know how accurate that statement is.

Speaking as someone who has moved a single array between about 5 machines over its lifetime, including from kernel 2.4 machines to kernel 2.6 machines, I'd say that if you've got a Linux software RAID array, it'll probably work on any Linux machine you can find to plug it into (assuming that machine has appropriate drives for the disk controllers and RAID level).

Re:Arrrg! Samba is not acceptable for macs!

[swinte]

I'm using NFS on a couple of my Macs talking to FreeNAS without any issues. I switched to NFS after getting cranky at how slow Netatalk and Samba were for my daily backup operations.